Michael Dolan Dot Com

Friday, May 16th, 2008

Ars covers In Re Bilski

Interesting analysis of the Bilski case. I hadn’t paid much attention to this case, so it’s great to see a tech pub covering the issues with software patents, business methods and algorithms outside the legal pubs. These are major issue and I would love to see a court actually put forth a rule that makes sense versus the nonsensical parameters we have today.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/software-patent-problems-abound.ars

At one extreme was Bilski’s attorney, who advocated a vague and permissive standard for patent eligibility, suggesting only that a patent must involve a significant amount of “real-world activity” to be eligible for patent protection. Since there would be little point in patenting a process that didn’t involve some amount of “real-world activity,” this standard barely limits the scope of patentable subject matter at all.

In the opposite corner was the US Patent and Trademark Office, which has rejected Bilski’s patent and argued last Thursday that a process must involve a tangible article—not something intangible like a contractual obligation—in order to be patentable. When pressed on whether such a standard would amount to a reversal of State Street—which concerned a patent on a system for converting intangible data from one form to another—the USPTO’s attorney insisted that the computer system in State Street involved a physical computer, whereas Bilski’s patent application was for a purely mental process that involved no hardware at all.